1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer peripheral technology, and more particularly, to a plug-and-play interconnection architecture and method with an in-device storage module in a peripheral device, which is designed for use to interconnect a peripheral device with a host computer unit without requiring user-operated installation of a device driver of the peripheral device.
2. Description of Related Art
Plug-and-play (PnP) is peripheral device linking technology that allows a user to interconnect a peripheral device, such as monitor, modem, printer, keyboard, pointing device, external storage device and so on, with a host computer unit, such as PC (personal computer) unit, workstation or server, without having to manually configure the computer's internal settings, i.e., BIOS settings including IRQ (interrupt request), DMA (direct memory access), and I/O and memory addresses. As the term implies, the user can “plug” a peripheral device to a PC unit and then “play” it instantly without having to manually configure the PC's internal BIOS settings. Due to this feature, a user who is unfamiliar with PC's BIOS settings can nevertheless install new peripheral devices to his/her PC unit successfully.
Conventional plug-and-play interconnection architectures, however, still have several drawbacks. Firstly, the user is still required to manually install the device driver of the plugged peripheral device on the host computer unit, which is quite time-consuming and still makes the technology hardly deserve the name of “plug and play”. Secondly, since the device driver and related product information are typically packed in floppy disks or CD/DVD discs, it would require more labor and cost on the manufacturer side to produce, which would make the production of computer peripheral devices quite laborious and thus cost-ineffective. Thirdly, for the host computer unit to recognize the PnP peripheral device, corresponding PnP configuration data of the peripheral device need to be centralized and stored in the host computer unit. This makes the host computer unit maintain a huge PnP-device database, which may be considered as a bottleneck for applications of PnP peripheral devices.